第42章

'I don't believe it for a moment,' he said, as he took his place on the rug before the fire in the drawing-room when the gentlemen came in from their wine. The ladies understood at once what it was that he couldn't believe. Mr Crawley had for the moment so usurped the county that nobody thought of talking of anything else.

'How is it the,' said Mrs Thorne, 'that Lord Lufton, and my husband, and the other wiseacres at Silverbridge, have committed him for trial?'

'Because we are told to do so by the lawyer,' said Dr Thorne.

'Ladies will never understand that magistrates must act in accordance with the law,' said Lord Lufton.

'But you all say he's not guilty,' said Mrs Robarts.

'The fact is, that the magistrate cannot try the question,' said the archdeacon; 'they only hear primary evidence. In this case I don't believe Crawley would ever have been committed if he had employed an attorney, instead of speaking for himself.'

'Why didn't somebody make him have an attorney?' said Lady Lufton.

'I don't think any attorney in the world could have spoken for him better than he spoke for himself,' said Dr Thorne.

'And yet you committed him,' said his wife. 'What can we do for him?

Can't we pay the bail and send him off to America?'

'A jury will never find him guilty,' said Lord Lufton.

'And what is the truth of it?' asked the younger Lady Lufton.

Then the whole matter was discussed again, and it was settled among them all that Mr Crawley had undoubtedly appropriated the cheque through temporary obliquity of judgment--obliquity of judgment and forgetfulness as to the source from whence the cheque had come to him. 'He has picked it up about the house, and then has thought that it was his own,' said Lord Lufton. Had they come to the conclusion that such an appropriation of money had been made by one of the clergy of the palace, by one of the Proudieian party, they would doubtless have been very loud and very bitter as to the iniquity of the offender. They would have said as much as to the weakness of the bishop and the wickedness of the bishop's wife, and would have declared the appropriator to have been as very a thief as ever picked a pocket or opened a bill;--but they were unanimous in their acquittal of Mr Crawley. It had not been his intention, they said, to be a thief, and a man should be judged only by his intention.

It must now be their object to induce a Barchester jury to look at the matter in the same light.

'When they come to understand how the land lies,' said the archdeacon, 'they will be all right. There's not a tradesman in the city who does not hate that woman as though she were--'

'Archdeacon,' said his wife, cautioning him to repress his energy.

'Their bills are all paid by this new chaplain they've got, and he is made to claim discount on every leg of mutton,' said the archdeacon.

Arguing from which fact--or from which assertion, he came to the conclusion that no Barchester jury would find Mr Crawley guilty.

But it was agreed on all sides that it would not be well to trust to the unassisted friendship of the Barchester tradesmen. Mr Crawley must be provided with legal assistance, and this must be furnished to him whether he should be willing or unwilling to receive it. That there would be a difficulty was acknowledged. Mr Crawley was known to be a man not easy of persuasion, with a will of his own, with a great energy of obstinacy on points which he chose to take as being of importance to his calling, or to his own professional status. He had pleaded his own cause before the magistrates, and it might be that he would insist on doing the same thing before the judge. At last Mr Robarts, the clergyman from Framley, was deputed from the knot of Crawleian advocates assembled at Lady Lufton's drawing-room, to undertake the duty of seeing Mr Crawley, and of explaining to him that his proper defence was regarded as a matter appertaining to the clergy and gentry generally of that part of the country, and that for the sake of the clergy and gentry the defence must of course be properly conducted. In such circumstances the expense of the defence would of course be borne by the clergy and gentry concerned. It was thought that Mr Robarts could put the matter to Mr Crawley with such a mixture of the strength of manly friendship and the softness of clerical persuasion, as to overcome the recognised difficulties of the task.